Delphi Collected Works of Max Brand US

by Max Brand

  He was most comfortably fixed. There was a large backyard of half an acre in which there were two or three fruit trees, an arched way covered with grapevines, and a patch of green lawn. When Stew Morrison looked off to the burning sheen of the desert, reflecting heat waves as a mirror reflects light, and then down to the green of that lawn, it seemed to him that his very soul grew more cool and comfortable in that fiery western room of his.

  Sometimes he saw the proprietor sitting out on the lawn under the walnut tree when the white-hot afternoon began to turn to a yellow light. Sometimes he would have his supper brought out to him there by a negro servant, whose only duty in the world was to attend to the wants of this one man. Now and again a gentle wind would blow to the window of Morrison the delicious fragrance of Borgen’s cigar.

  He was the only man in town who could afford a personal servant and Havana cigars; and he indulged in both as though he had been born in the lap of luxury. Morrison, who knew better, grinned until those protruding teeth of his showed to the full. What they knew of Borgen in the town, he had learned, was simply that he was a fellow who had struck it rich in the mines some time before. Just where the mines were, no one seemed quite sure. Some said Montana; some said Alaska.

  At least it was clear that the newcomer had plenty of money. Neither was he afraid to spend it. He had invested heavily in the ruined business of the storekeeper, but his prices were not only equitable, they were even a shade below the prices of other stores in neighboring towns. The townspeople were so surprised by this that some of them even expressed their wonder to him.

  “Look here,” said Lew Borgen, removing his cigar from between his teeth, “I ain’t here for a minute to clean you out and move on. I’m here for life, you see? I ain’t aiming to make a million in a minute. What I want is to make enough to live on. That suits me; and if it suits you, then we’re all happy.”

  He was learning to smile, too, which was an art he had almost forgotten in his days of lesser prosperity. He was a bit fatter, too, and he showed the increase of flesh chiefly in his face. All of these things the detective noticed daily from his western window, looking down over the garden of the store-keeper. For his own part, he was like a hundred other men who had worked in the interests of law and order — that is to say, he had a thousand suspicions concerning Lew Borgen, but he was unable to prove a single one of the thousand.

  He knew, to his own satisfaction, that the fellow was a crook, the more dangerous because he was so smooth and so consistently secret. But, even with the vital assistance of the suggestion of Monson and Montague, he felt that he had no easy task in apprehending The Whisperer, to say nothing of taking Borgen himself in the midst of a criminal act.

  All he could do was to watch the man next door, and he spent every moment of his time in surveying Borgen. In order to do this, he simply gave out that he was suffering with lung trouble and that he had come West in order to enjoy the dry air. His cadaverous appearance amply reinforced this statement with every appearance of the most perfect truth. Stew Morrison was pitied and resolutely shunned, which was exactly what he wanted. He moved day and night whither he would, and no man asked him a question.

  Yet, though he maintained his vigil for a full ten days, he found not a single scrap of evidence to reassure him that Montague and companion had told him the truth. Lew Borgen was playing the part of the retired and prosperous man of business, now amusing himself with the affairs of this little store. Finally, to get nearer to him, Stew Morrison ventured forth one day and disposed himself in the bushes under the fruit trees in the backyard of Borgen. He lay there, sweltering, all of an afternoon. In the evening he had the pleasure of seeing Borgen come forth and sit down near by, and whistle through his fat, thick lips, and smoke. But there was nothing except a few words at supper time between Borgen and his negro. Yet Morrison persisted, because he felt that he was now taking his last chance, and he wished to try it out thoroughly.

  He came back the second afternoon and lay among the brush and was baked and burned by the heat, for the bushes only afforded him a meager tracery of shadow. But in the evening of this day Borgen did not come out at all. On the third day, to be sure, he came forth onto the lawn, but again nothing happened, the evening wore away, and the night came thick and black upon the place until he could make out only the outline of Borgen, sitting among the stars, and the red, round glowing of his cigar.

  Borgen had twice yawned as bedtime approached; and then it was that Morrison heard the whisper. It came, to his horror, from the shrubbery not two feet away. He dared not turn his head, and yet it seemed to Morrison impossible that a creature could be there in the flesh and blood. No living substance could have forced its way among those brittle twigs and dead leaves without making sufficient noise to attract his attention. So, shaking with horror, he listened and watched.

  Borgen had sprung up at the first sound, with a little grunt, such as men utter when they have received a severe shock.

  “Good heavens!” Morrison heard the store-keeper mutter.

  “Sit down, you fool!” said the whisper. It was a most faintly guarded murmur, rather than an entirely sibilant speech. It was far fainter, indeed, than a whisper.

  Borgen sat down as though he had been jammed into the chair with an invisible hand.

  “Someone may be watching,” said the murmur. “You act like a jackass, Borgen!”

  “It — it took me by surprise,” said Borgen.

  “Put your hand against your cheek, Borgen, when you talk; and not so loud. If you whisper loud enough for your own ear, you can lay to it that I’ll make out what you say. Who’s got that second-story room in that house?”

  “A lunger.”

  “Sure?”

  “Yep.”

  “He’s got a nice view from that there window; he can see your fat back every evening, eh?”

  Borgen shrugged his shoulders; but Morrison was prickling with horror. It was strange indeed that at a glance this fellow — and he could not doubt that it was the famous and terrible Whisperer himself — had pierced to the root of Borgen’s danger! What was there about that window to seem suspicious? It was open, but every window was surely kept open in weather such as this! No, it seemed to be the result of instinctive caution and insight. Morrison felt that he was trailing a lion indeed!

  “What is it?” asked Borgen.

  “A job, Borgen, of course. Are you ready?”

  “Of course! But”

  “Well?”

  “Chief, I’ve got enough to quit on! I’m ready and willing to stop when you say the word. You can get one of the other boys to take the lead, but I have enough money to live on, and I’m losing my nerve!”

  The Whisperer did not retort to this singular confession. He waited for a time as though digesting its full purport, and then he said: “Very well, Borgen; but once out of the gang, you never get back in, you understand? If you get out and then go broke, never expect to get back in to make some more coin. When you’re through with me, I’m through with you, and forever!”

  Borgen gasped out a faint protest. “If it’s that way, chief, then I’m with you to the end.”

  “We’ll both think that over. In the meantime, I’ve got a job for you.”

  “I’m ready, chief, for anything.”

  “You’ve got too fat and soft to do much but sit still,” said the robber sternly. “But I want you to take word from me to two of the boys.”

  “Which ones?” asked Borgen, leaning forward in eagerness to propitiate this angered patron.

  “Jerry and Montague.”

  “I can reach ’em by the morning.”

  “That’s right. Make it a night ride and then back again. They mustn’t know, in this here town, that you do a little wandering around by night!”

  “Right, chief.”

  “Ride like the devil, then. Tell me first, are the two of ’em straight and square with us?”

  “Yes. Straight as strings, both of ’em, so far as I know!”


  “Darned strange, then, that they’ve both bought tickets East. Looks as though that meant running out on us, don’t it?”

  Borgen gasped with astonishment, and again that prickling of horror ran through the blood of the detective. He himself had just received word from the two that they were beginning to be afraid to stay in the country.

  “Tickets East — the skunks!” breathed Borgen.

  “And you thinking of pulling out, too; I see that I’ve been letting you all get too fat,” said The Whisperer. “But go on and take this word to the two of ’em. Tell ’em that they’re to start riding, tomorrow at noon, for Jessup. They’re to go straight down the Richmond Road and through the Richmond Valley. Somewhere along the road they’ll get their instructions about what they’re to do and where they’re to go. You understand?”

  “Noon tomorrow — down the Richmond Road, through the valley, and instructions on the way. I understand, chief. Anything else?”

  “Yes.” There was a little and ominous pause, and then the bandit went on: “Tell the others what you know about those tickets East, and tell ’em that Montague and Monson are riding through the Richmond Valley tomorrow afternoon.”

  There was a slight rustling among the brush. “Chief!” breathed Borgen.

  But there was no answer; The Whisperer had withdrawn as silently and as swiftly as he had come.

  XXIII. AT THE COTTAGE

  RANKIN WAS A combination of bloodhound and bulldog; for, while he had a most true and delicate scent on a trail, he had the pugnacious qualities of a bulldog when he closed on the foe. When he boarded the train for California he was determined to stay with this work until he ran down the trail to the ground, if it required the rest of his life to complete the task. He had the sanguine expectation of the dropping water, which only needs infinite time to wear away the stone upon which it falls. Furthermore, he was exceedingly glad to be away from the mountain desert, for he felt that he was out of place there. In a city, he assured himself, he could never have been set upon, surprised, and rendered foolish, as he had been in that forest scene of unpleasant memory. But, once in a more civilized land, he promised himself that all would be changed.

  When the train reached Oakland, he left it and traveled straight north to the town of Richmond; from that point he began his investigations. He hired a flivver and in the little car he began to work his way south over the network of roads. He had two things to guide him: The one was that the house he wanted was near a creek, and there are not so many of them among the sun-browned hills near San Francisco Bay; the other was the description of the house as lying near a village.

  It made hard work for Rankin. Whenever he reached a town, he went out about a mile from it and began to trace a loose, weaving circle, going in and outside of the prescribed limits; for when Saylor had told the girl that he lived a mile from the town, he might have been merely approximating the distance; and his boyish recollection might have lengthened a half mile or shortened a mile and a half to the distance he mentioned to her. The detective took no chances. He dared not do so.

  He was helped in his work by the people he met. Your true Californian talks to everybody and everything, it might be said. It is the last relic remaining in his character of the frontier disposition; for in the earlier days people were so few and far between that conversational moments were like rare gems, to be enjoyed to the utmost. Rankin found that the farmers stopped their buggies and hung a foot over the side while they chatted with him; and when he toured along by-paths, on foot, school-boys returning home in the mid-afternoon trailed along beside him and chattered like the birds in the trees above them. If he had kept a gossip book, he could have filled it at the end of every day with the odds and ends of information which he received.

  Within a week, he found ten families named Saylor and all living near villages, but not one corresponded in all the details of a white cottage with blue blinds and a red-brick walk near a creek.

  He pushed on, a little daunted, but still determined. He reached the Berkeley hills, beautiful beyond dreams, but beauty of scenery was not wanted by Rankin; he wished results and results only.

  On the fourth day of that pilgrimage through the hills, he stumbled across the bottom of a dry slough, toiled his way up the farther slope, and then cursed freely at what lay just before him across the road. For there sat a little cottage painted white, with blue shutters, and behind the front gate the red-brick walk was embrowned by long weathering, and worn into hallows by many a year of use. It was just the place as Saylor had described his mother’s house, but the detective had encountered half a dozen other places which equally well answered the description. All the setting was wrong.

  What lay down the road he could not tell, and there might well enough be a village where it curved out of sight down a hill, but all the rest was wrong. Here was no creek by a dead slough which would run with water only during the rainy season; and the western hill, which must be covered with a walnut orchard, was as bare as the palm of his hand.

  He turned back toward the cottage with a weary eye. It was a restful place. Upon either side of it arose an immense walnut tree, so very huge that the house shrank into a pigmy size in comparison. While the fields near by burned and quivered with the white of the sunshine, the intertwining branches of the walnuts drenched the cottage with shadow. There was a seat built around the trunk of either tree, and a modest little garden made a patterning of color in the shade.

  All was neatly ordered and well preserved. None of the heads of the pickets of the fence which surrounded the place had been broken off — a great rarity indeed among such fences, he had observed — and the whole had recently been painted white so that it shone in the sun, doubly bright against the dark green of the hedge which grew immediately behind it. A schoolboy came past, swinging his lunch pail, and he stopped when the stranger hailed him, making great round eyes at Rankin and digging the rubbed toes of his shoes into the dust. He was as brown as an African campaigner; only around his eyes there was a faint rimming of white.

  “Do you know who lives in that house, son?”

  “Mrs. Richards,” said the boy. “Ain’t she home? She’s always at home!”

  His interest in such a strange possibility made him forget his shyness and with another question the detective drew him out.

  “She’s napping now,” said the boy. “If she ain’t sitting on the front porch sewing, or if she ain’t pottering around in the garden, she’s napping inside. Mostly she’s around where you can see her from the road.”

  “You’ve been walking quite a ways,” said Rankin, apparently changing the subject. “Far to school?”

  “About a mile.”

  The heart of Rankin leaped.

  “Is that in the town?”

  “Sure. The school is right on the edge of town.”

  So Rankin, his blood quickened with hope, raised his eyes toward the top of the western hill and the barren level seemed to mock him.

  “Tell me,” he said desperately, “was there ever an orchard on that hill?”

  “You mean the walnuts? They were pulled out last year. They never done no good up there. Pa said it was because the fog from the bay could get at ’em too easy!”

  Rankin forgot the boy; he forgot the dryness of the slough behind him. For that matter, it might be referred to as a creek by one who did not care to be too exact. But here, beyond a shadow of a doubt, was his place; and coming upon it thus shocked him, as though it had been suddenly created here for his sole benefit. The boy went up the road, kicking through the dust, which followed him in lazy drifts, and now the screen door of the cottage, which opened on the front porch, jingled.

  It was Mrs. Richards who stood in the shadow — a rather tall, stooped woman, with gloves upon her thin hands, a watering pot in one hand and a trowel in the other. Rankin advanced, and when he tipped his hat, she smiled down at him. It was such a kind and wistful old face that he felt rare impulse to wish to be of help to her. It
was not hard to smile back at her.

  “You’re Mrs. Richards?” he said.

  “Do you know me?” she asked. It was just the pleasant, quiet voice which he had expected. Such a woman, it was very possible, could, by too much mothering, produce that mild-eyed and shrinking fellow who called himself Saylor, and who had wormed his way into the affections of the rancher’s daughter. Why had he changed his name then? Rankin was drinking deep of expectation every instant.

  “I’ve heard about you in town,” said he to answer her question. “I’ve heard about you as the lady who had the finest Virginia Creeper in the world!”

  There it was, advertising its own existence well enough. The trunk was like the trunk of a tree, brown, and covered with rough bark. The arms stretched out with thick muscles on either side, and the smaller branches made a great network across the face of the porch, screening all within, and around the corners to an unknown distance, and up the roof to the very top. It was a magnificent vine, indeed, and now Mrs. Richards came down the steps and shaded her eyes while she peered up at it.

  “It is a big one,” she said, “but I’ve seen better ones, I think. Are you interested in gardens?”

  “Very!” lied Rankin.

  “Here is some pretty cosmos,” she suggested with a sort of timid pride, and she invited him in by pointing to the clumps of it.

  Rankin was instantly in the yard, and his clumsy hunt for adjectives to describe the delicate and feathery flowers and their dainty tints of lavender and pink and white might have told her he was only a pretender, but she was now in her own world, and too deep in her subject to be critical. She led him about the little place, while he exclaimed and smiled and praised and then waited for a chance to ask leading questions. It was too bad, he finally ventured, that she had no strong-armed husband or sturdy boys to help her turn the soil around that row of loganberries in the backyard, he ventured at last.

  “My husband is dead, and my poor Charlie, but Jack is still alive — dear Jack!” she told him. “But he’s in Canada, you know.”