by Max Brand
“Champion,” said this apparition in a whisper, or in a murmur even less piercing than a whisper, “Champion, you rat, get out your gun!”
Champion, with a groan of dread, his teeth showing like a cornered rat indeed, went for his Colt. But he suddenly spun around with a scream and pitched forward upon his face, for the masked stranger had beaten him on the draw.
The Ferret lay without stirring. The stranger tossed into the room a thick wallet, which struck upon the back of the fallen man, unfolded, and exposed, inside, two thick sheafs of greenbacks. While the glances of the gang turned to this, The Whisperer disappeared; for when they looked up again, he was gone from before the door.
Neither did any of them care to follow his trail or to make further inquiries into his existence.
Lew Borgen, who had seen him before, and now had been delivered from the extremest danger by his last appearance, seemed hardly less shocked than any of the others in the gang by what had happened. He took up the big wallet, and there was nothing said while they turned the body of Sam Champion upon his back and saw that he had been shot fairly between the eyes, as though the man, or devil in the form of a man, who had just been before them, had chosen to exhibit his skill.
“Here’s something from The Whisperer,” said Lew Borgen, bringing a piece of paper out of the wallet, and he showed to them a white scrap upon which a brief message had been hastily printed.
“Let the boys split up this loot in the regular way,” he read to them. “Except that Anson gets his own share and my three shares. I had my part out of the game. I think the sheriff will agree.”
This was signed, the name being printed neatly like the rest of it.
It was an amazing letter to receive, and it could not have come more opportunely. The gang watched the lieutenant count out the spoils. There was the considerable sum of twenty-five thousand dollars, and every dollar was made ten-fold sweet by the understanding that it had come from the house and the safe of the sheriff, himself, on the very evening when he had been feasting his friends and boasting that The Whisperer and his gang were put down forever.
The division was made on the spur of the moment. With their hands full of money, the dead man upon the floor was almost forgotten. They carried him out at last and placed his body in a rift among the rocks. Then they climbed upon either side of the little gully above him and pried loose and rolled down upon him a monumental mass of tons of rock. This was his burial, and when it was completed, the cavalcade turned soberly away. They had their pockets full of money, to be sure, but they were very thoughtful. Two men fell back behind the others and entered into a most serious conversation.
They were Joe Montague and Jerry Monson. They drew their horses back to a slow walk and so let the rest drift farther ahead of them; neither did they talk to each other, but scowled at the road, as though even through the silence their grave thoughts were being communicated to each other.
Finally Joe Montague broke the quiet. “How does it look to you, Jerry?” he asked.
“The same way it looks to you, old son — spooky as the devil, I’d call it!”
Joe shuddered, and they fell silent again, scowling more than ever.
“At least,” said Jerry, “that ghost has treated the boys pretty square.”
“Has it?”
“What you mean by talking in that tone?”
“A few weeks back there was four of us — there was you and me and Tirrit and Sam Champion. We’d all swore to hang close together, and we’d hung close together just the way we swore we would. We’d gone into all the same things together. We’d fought for each other. We’d pulled each other out of the hole many a time, eh, lad? And now, all in a few weeks, half of us are gone!”
“You mean that The Whisperer has it in for us?”
“I don’t mean nothing,” muttered the other, glancing nervously behind him as though he feared even then that the dreadful figure which had destroyed Champion a short time before might be hovering upon wings to overhear this conversation. “I don’t mean nothing, but I’ll tell you plain and fair, speaking man to man, that I got a feeling in my bones that you and me, old son, are due to get bumped off next. You can lay to that!”
Upon this cheerful disclosure they both meditated for a considerable space. When a landslide suddenly rumbled in the far distance they both started and then cursed.
“Jerry,” said Joe Montague at length, “who could The Whisperer be — if you think he’s got it in for us, the same as I think?”
“I dunno,” answered Jerry. “The four of us have stepped on a good many toes, in our day.”
“We have.”
“But ain’t there been a good reason for Tirrit and Champion to have been bumped off? They was each of ’em trying to get something on The Whisperer.”
“That’s something I’ll never try.”
“Nor me.”
“D’you think we’d better make a run for it?”
“No, I say, stay by the guns and keep watching and waiting. If The Whisperer is after us, running away ain’t going to help none!”
“That’s a true thing.”
They plodded on. Once Jerry thought he heard a crunching of gravel behind them as of an approaching horse, and he crowded close to Joe, cursing with fear. Once they both reined in their horses with one accord, as though they saw, at the same instant, a form in the night in front of them.
XII. KENWORTHY’S MOVE
KENWORTHY WAS A man whose level temper and genial good nature, even under trying conditions, were universally admired, but it must be admitted that he passed under a cloud after the invasion of his house and the blowing of his safe. He would not believe that there existed in the world a man at once so bold and so foolish as to recklessly defy him, Percival Kenworthy, formidable not only in himself, but now made doubly awful by his office of sheriff.
He spent a solid week melting horseflesh upon the mountain trails and contributing even a quantity of his own none too solid weight. Then he came back to his ranch house looking a little more tanned than usual, with his face a trifle thinner. But he was at least able to smile again, and, holding up his head, he could present a fair face to the world after what he considered his shame.
Considerable time was spent in planning what rC4le would be the best for him to assume, but finally he decided there was much to be said if only he could open his lips. He went into town, therefore, wearing a smile which did not come off even when the most eminent of the citizens saw him and went to make more special personal inquiry of what he had seen and done on the trail of the famous criminal. To their questions, Kenworthy replied with a smile and a wave of the hand. It was as much as to say that everything was getting on very well, and that before long he would have news for them that would be surprising. With this they had to be content, while the sheriff went on to his office, where he sat swearing at the blank wall before him and grinding his teeth and praying for an inspiration.
It was not the loss of the money which so greatly affected him. It was the loss of his prestige. He was known as the man who never failed; and he would have thrown another fifty thousand dollars after twenty-five which he had already lost if he could have lodged The Whisperer safely behind the bars of a prison or seen him lying dead at his feet.
He was not foolish enough to trust to his own unaided efforts, however. For Percival Kenworthy was one of those rare men who are convinced of their superiority to all others and who yet, in their heart of hearts well understand that they have only succeeded in the world because of favorable position, money, inherited influence, and the hired brains of others thrown into their affairs. Of his own weakness Kenworthy was not unaware, though he found an excuse for it, or at least a high attitude from which to regard it.
Many a king, he told himself, did everything through ministers and the generals, and yet the ministers and the generals were forgotten, and, in the annals of history, the name of the king alone was remembered. What he decided was that he would hereafter
show his hand less and less. Instead, he would rely more and more upon experts and specialists. He now wanted to capture a man. He himself could not even capture a cow.
He had become a great and famous rancher without ever learning to swing a rope or shoot straight with a revolver, but he had hundreds in his employ who could do both things. He was a fool, then, to suddenly appear like a knight at the head of forces and ride out through the mountains. He could only make himself saddle weary and render himself less magnificent in the eyes of other and lesser men.
That very day two men arrived in response to telegrams which he had dispatched immediately after the robbery in his own house. He had hoped that when they arrived he would have finished the business, and could dismiss them with a grand gesture. But now it appeared that he was too sadly in need of them.
They called at his office the same day that he reached town after his return from the trail of The Whisperer. The first to come in was a tall man, built narrowly from head to foot. Only his feet and his hands were huge. The rest of him looked like a normal man who had been taken by the top and bottom and stretched out half a dozen inches longer than he was meant to be. He was about two inches over six feet, and he weighed less than a hundred and fifty pounds! He had a head like a parrot’s, being very small, very round, with a great red beak of a hooked nose, and two tiny and extraordinarily bright eyes set close in on either side of the nose. He had protruding teeth of great length from which his lips fell away in a continual smile. In short, he was exactly the sort of a gawky man at whom the little boys in the street love to point their fingers. Even Percival Kenworthy, though he knew the importance of his caller, had to blink twice or thrice before he could readjust his thoughts with what his eyes told him.
He had before him the celebrated “Stew” Morrison, more formally known as Oliver Wainwright Morrison, and hence also nicknamed “Ow” Morrison. He was a man of fifty who looked forty; he was a ridiculous mask of ugliness and femininity, and yet he had the heart of a hero; he looked like a simpleton who should have been sheltered carefully from the roughness of the world, and yet he had been for fifteen years one who earned his living by following the man trail.
Stew Morrison folded his immense brown hands around one knee and watched with lackluster eyes while his patron detailed the difficulties of the job. When Kenworthy ended he asked abruptly what Mr. Morrison would charge, and Mr. Morrison assured him that he never worried about charges until he felt himself really on the trail, and that on this occasion, if he captured The Whisperer, he felt that Mr. Kenworthy would probably give him more than he, himself, had the effrontery to ask.
With this assertion he withdrew, promising that he would begin work at once. He stepped out on the street, whistling to his heels at a little, yellow-hided cur which skulked along with its tail between its legs and its nose so close to its master’s feet that it had to halt at each step as the heels of the man hunter rose. The sheriff had gone to the window to watch the tall and gawky form stride down the street, and now he flushed with shame and laughed with amusement as he followed this specter with his glance. He would rather lose ten thousand, he decided, than have the public at large know that he had hired such a creature as a confidential agent.
He had hardly reseated himself in front of his desk when his second caller arrived. This was a man as far opposed in appearance to Old Morrison as it was possible to imagine. He was a broad and burly chunk of a man with a businesslike eye, and an immense energy showing in all of his movements. When he sat down and clapped his hands upon his knees and looked at the sheriff, the glance from his eyes was like the thrust of another’s hands, and strong hands at that. He heard the details from beginning to end, and then he spoke.
“I’ve read up the whole thing,” said Mr. Stephen Rankin. “I think I know this case backward already. I’ve already thought of a clue that nobody else has noticed. I’ve already thought of a criminal though nobody else has even looked that way.”
Mr. Kenworthy was delighted by such a bearing of brisk decisiveness, and he could hardly refrain from saying so, though it was his policy never to praise men with words; but to let his money speak for him in that respect after he had been served.
“I have my own suspicion,” he said, “that there may be some rascal in my own house who has betrayed me, working in conjunction with someone on the outside, of course. There’s a great deal pointing in that direction. Who but a servant would have known where the safe was, or how to move so smoothly into and out from the house?”
The second man hunter swallowed a smile and made himself look gravely into the face of the sheriff.
“I see,” he said, “that you have had a great deal of experience in our profession”
“You might call me a novice; I have only begun,” said the sheriff, as happy as a girl at the prospect of a compliment.
“Well,” said Mr. Rankin, “it’s a hard life, but it might amuse you. In the meantime, I’ll follow up your clue along with some of my own.”
“And your rate?”
“My rate, sir, is like a doctor’s. It goes up and down with the nature of the service and the size of the patient’s income. In your case — why, I think that ten thousand dollars might be”
“Ten thousand hell cats!” shouted the rancher.
“Dollars,” said the detective, and smiled calmly upon him. “Sometimes I mend reputations, and sometimes I make ’em!”
XIII. MR. GLENHOLLEN
THE WORTHY SHERIFF was himself amazed when, ten minutes later, Mr. Rankin walked out of the office with all of his terms agreed to; he was to have ten thousand dollars in cash, payable the instant the criminal was placed in the hands of the sheriff. Moreover, he agreed to disappear as soon as he had done his work, take no portion of the public eye or the public credit for his work, and let all the honor, if possible, rest upon the shoulders of Mr. Kenworthy.
This part of the contract was infinitely soothing to the sheriff, but even so, he found that the prospect of paying out ten thousand dollars, in addition to his other losses was a hornet’s sting indeed! He strove to be philosophical, however, and told himself that there was only one thing of true worth in life, and that this was reputation, as the poet proclaimed; his own repute had been damaged, and how lucky was he if the expenditure of money could restore his tarnishing fame!
For men everywhere were beginning to smile at a sheriff who could not protect his own house from the invasion of the criminal against whom he had arrayed all the forces of the law. He felt that he had this day added two strings to his bow. The one, Stew Morrison, might be of very small service, but the other was a man upon whom he felt he could reasonably build. Besides, the best things demand the best prices, and the hardest nuts have the sweetest kernels.
He had just fortified himself with that maxim when fate presented him with a more delightful consolation, one which quite wiped from his mind, by its importance, all thought of The Whisperer and his fellow malefactors. For there now appeared at the door of his office no other person than young Alexander Glenhollen, the son of the only rancher in the mountains who could lay a claim to greater acres and more coin in the bank than Mr. Kenworthy himself. His fortune was perhaps less widely known, because Mr. Alexander Glenhollen, senior, was a man who did not talk, even at his own board, and so the world remained in ignorance of his wealth, to some extent.
But the well-informed bankers, including Mr. Kenworthy, knew that Mr. Glenhollen’s fortune had mounted up into the millions, and that under his wise management it was increasing each year. Mr. Kenworthy himself knew that he could drop all of his estate within that of the Glenhollen fortune and that there would be still room enough left for his to rattle about from side to side.
His eyes, therefore, widened a little as he rose to greet young Mr. Glenhollen. On the whole, he sincerely disliked young men, because he held that the salt and the savor of life did not appear in a man until he was well past forty, at least; at fifty, say, they began to be truly mellow. Mr. Kenw
orthy was at this time exactly fifty. However, the voice and the handshake which Mr. Kenworthy now offered to Mr. Glenhollen were of that pattern which he ordinarily reserved for the widows of deceased directors in his bank.
Mr. Glenhollen sat down. He was a young man as erect as football and crew in a great university could make him. The muscles of his neck were so stiff and thick that he could not help carrying his head like a conquering hero. He had a tawny growth of hair which was often uncombable, which, when it stood on end, gave him the unmistakable look of a ruffian. He had a pair of blue eyes, pale, and full of fires which had long ago burned in a viking ancestor, who carved out his fortune upon the iron coast of Scotland. He had a jaw which seemed to invite buffets, but, above all, he had a smile which dawned suddenly and delightfully now and then and which proclaimed him a prince of good fellows.
He now placed his hands upon his knees in a way that reminded Mr. Kenworthy very much of the detective who had last sat in that same chair. But there were great differences between their manners. The detective had talked with the smoothest assurance. Mr. Glenhollen grew alternately crimson and white, and his voice disappeared in his stomach and then trembled in his nose. But at length he managed to tell the sheriff that he, Mr. Glenhollen, ventured to aspire toward the hand of his daughter, and that he wished to secure the permission of the father before he addressed his attentions to the child.
Mr. Kenworthy closed his eyes. He was almost fainting with bliss; he grew pale with it. When he thought of the tremendous significance of this alliance it occurred to him that the god of love was not blind after all, but was a most blessed little deity. His daughter married to young Glenhollen! He would not have ventured to have even hoped for such a thing; it was too perfect. But, in the meantime, his closed eyes and his pale face seemed to be misinterpreted by the prince. That wretched young man was stammering and fast being wrecked by confusion.