by Max Brand
The two dangers which I had to keep in mind were first, that the fire which was essential for cookery might be seen; second, that the mare might neigh if she heard another horse going down the trail. As for the mare, she was a sensitive, intelligent creature, and when she was startled by any sound in the woods, I could soothe her by speaking softly. She got so that she would come right up to me and nuzzle my hand like a dog.
As for the fire, I did my cooking at night because by day the smoke was sure to be seen. At night, I built my fire among a nest of rocks which screened the light very effectually, and I worked with a small, low flame, always. It used to take me two hours to do my cookery every other day. For ten whole days I remained in this spot.
In the afternoons I would venture up the face of the mountain which jumped at the sky right behind my covert. It looked over the rest of the lower mountains and the tangle of ravines and the little hollows and valleys which cut the face of the landscape. These I mapped in my mind as well as I could. Through the clear mountain air, I could look for limitless miles, and see far off the trails which twisted here and there.
When I had studied until my mind was full, I would steal back to the clearing and draw a map as accurately as I could remember each detail, even down to the trails. The next day, I carried my map with me and corrected it. Each day I studied more, until I began to have a deep familiarity with the items of that wide spread of mountains.
Only where peaks as lofty as my own went up from the general mass of roughness, there had to be blind spots in my knowledge. But I had a great mass of directions and localities and landmarks listed in due order.
On the tenth afternoon, when I came back through the mist and color of the sunset time, I smelled cigarette smoke from my clearing, and I knew that my hiding place had been discovered.
Of course I decided first to sneak away. But a second thought made me go on. I wanted to have a glance at the peculiar spy who, having found my rendezvous, had the folly to sit down and smoke at leisure in it! I wanted to see how many were in his party!
I came along with the care of a hunting snake and not much more noise, I think. Finally, when I reached the edge of the clearing, I saw only one man. He had his back to a tree; the side of his face was turned toward me; his hat was in his lap, and I saw the most welcome sight I could have wished for — the gray hair and the alert features of my benefactor — Tex Cummins!
“Tex!” said I, and stepped into the clearing.
He jumped up and shook hands with me.
“You’re fixed up quite snug here,” said he.
It was wonderfully good to hear a human voice after ten days of silence. The first thing I wanted to know was: How had he found me?
“Nothing mysterious about that,” said Cummins. “When I heard that the sheriff had been working like a madman and had called out twenty of the best trail followers and sign readers in the mountains to help him, and when I found that he had worked for a whole week and hadn’t come across a shadow or a trace of you, I decided that one of two things had happened.
“Either you and your horse had dropped off a trail into one of the rivers, or else you were tucked away and lying close under cover. I couldn’t figure on the first thing. I could figure on the second. The more I thought of you and remembered that you are a pretty crafty youngster and not simply a gun puller, I decided that you had probably put yourself away right under the nose of the sheriff himself.
“I made his house the center, and I started cutting for signs from that spot. It has taken me two days. But here we are!”
It made me like him better than ever. In my first meetings with this odd man, there had been an air of reserve about him, a touch of mystery, something cryptic and “smart” in his speech. But now he was as simple and familiar as the most unpretentious man in the world. I could not help smiling upon him. At that moment, I had a real affection for him.
“This gives me a chance,” said I, “to thank you for what you’ve done for me, Tex. I want to say”
He waved my thanks into limbo. “Look here, kid,” said he, “I got as much fun out of helping you as you got out of being helped. Maybe more! So the score is quit on that side of it.”
“Let the gratitude go, then,” said I. “I owe you quite a bit of hard cash.”
“Very well,” said he. “I don’t mind having a few bits of money owing to me. It makes me feel that I have an anchor to windward.”
He did not pause here, but went right on: “In the meantime, what are your schemes, youngster?”
I remembered Mike O’Rourke.
“I have only one scheme,” said I. “I want to go straight.”
Tex nodded at me. “I can tell you the one way to do it,” said he.
“Fire away!” cried I, feeling that the mystery was about to be solved for me by his wits.
“Take your gun up and look it in the eye and pull the trigger,” said my friend Tex Cummins. “Because the nearest place where you can go straight is heaven, my son!”
It seemed very foolish for a youngster of my age to contradict a man as clever and as filled with experience as Tex Cummins. I simply said, after a moment when the shock had passed off a bit: “Well, I may look around and find a way.”
“Look around — sure,” said Tex. “I wish you luck. I hope they don’t fill you full of lead while you’re looking. That’s all. But tell me what you might have in your mind to do?”
“Why, I don’t know,” said I, feeling that my brain was spinning under the contact of this direct argument. “There ought to be a way.”
“A man has to eat,” said Tex, getting down to facts. “You admit that?”
“Of course.”
“A man has to have company. You admit that?”
I had a hasty impulse to say that I thought a man might get on very well in some sort of a way, living by himself. But I felt that a lonely honesty would be rather dull with nothing but an occasional mountain goat for an audience to one’s integrity.
“I admit that,” said I at last.
“Well, how’ll you get it?” asked Tex. “How’ll you get food and companionship without being nabbed by the other honest men who are living straight, too?”
The very fact that he himself gave up the idea as an impractical one was about enough for me. Mike O’Rourke began to loom in my mind as a dear girl — but an excessively impractical one.
“It has me beat,” said I.
“It has me beat, too,” said Tex. “I tried to go straight. I tried it for years. I got jailed for something that I did in boyish ignorance, and I couldn’t get my freedom although I broke away from jail because I was always recognized, as you will be.
“But with you, it’s a different case. I had broken jail accused of fighting. You have broken jail accused of murder! There’s a difference. I didn’t pull a gun during the whole course of my wanderings. You’ve shot down three men and reduced a sheriff to the edge of a nervous breakdown. You have a build and a face that can be snapshot in a few words:
“‘Eighteen years old, looks like a Mexican prize fighter, six feet two, weighs a hundred and ninety.’
“That would hit you off. They have hit you off. They’ve plastered telegrams all over the mountains about you, and this little affair of Lawton and his trained man hunters has made everyone keen to get you; because the man that lands you now will make his reputation. They’re going out in batches of three and four and trying their hands at amateur work. They’ve stacked up a twenty-five-hundred-dollar reward on your head!
“Now, my boy, I’m not a fool, and you know it. When I was a kid, I was a sharp youngster. But with everything in my favor, I couldn’t beat the game.
“With everything against you, how can you expect to?”
He was so direct and crisp that there was no avoiding the conclusions that he reached. I felt that he was right. I did have to live, and when my money gave out, I either had to work for money or steal money, so far as I could see. How could I work honestly for it?
I told Tex that he was right, though it went against the grain to do it, and I was glad that Mike O’Rourke couldn’t hear me say that. Tex nodded at me, and told me that I showed a bit of sense to agree with him.
“What I came up here for,” said he, “is to tell you that I think I can show you how to make money fast and easy. It’s risky business, but you’re the sort of a fellow who enjoys a risk.”
I told him that wasn’t true. But he merely shrugged his shoulders.
“I’ve seen you fight with your fists,” said he, “and I’ve heard how you fight with guns. How many kids at eighteen have killed their man and shot down four other men — each one a fighter?”
He went on quietly. He was all the more persuasive because his voice was so quiet.
“I saw it in you when I watched you fight Harry Chase. I saw that you were afraid of him, but I also saw that you were able to stand up and fight fast and hit hard in spite of your fear. In ten seconds, you were enjoying that fight. It was about the best fun you had ever had in your life. Isn’t that true?”
I had to nod at Tex Cummins.
“Of course,” said Tex, “it would be very pleasant if I could tell you that the only reason I have tried to help you is because I liked you and wanted you to get out of trouble. That was partly the reason. The other truth is that I thought I might be able to use you, one of these days. Now I think that the time has come!”
It was rather shocking, such frankness. But still I can’t say that I didn’t like him all the better for it, instead of hearing some sneaking, hypocritical excuses such as the way was well paved for.
He said: “I’m what you might call an employment manager of crooks, Leon. I don’t do the actual work myself. I leave that to my men who are scattered here and there through the mountains and the desert. My job is to plan big things. I find the bank that can be robbed and I find the watchman or the clerk that will take the bribe to start things going. I locate the express shipment of hard cash and find out what train it is coming on.
“I get a whole lot of details that makes a whole lot of things possible, and then I make a split in the profits. The commission I take is a big split. I get half. But out of my half comes all the hush money that has been scattered along the line. You understand? Sometimes it costs a lot. I’ve actually pulled through a fifty-thousand-dollar job and found at the completion of it that I had lost a few hundred dollars after my twenty-five thousand was paid to me.
“Still, it was profitable because it gave a couple of my men a handsome profit. Other times, I clear up thirty or forty per cent of my share as clear velvet. But I have to pay out big money all the time. I have to take trips through the mountains. I find some rancher on a small place who is barely making both ends meet. I size him up, and if he looks all right to me I say: ‘Suppose that a fellow should come along some day or night and say: “Partner, I need a fresh horse — or I need a meal — or I need a little cash — or I need some ammunition and a gun” — what would you do if he were to say: “Tex Cummins sent me?”’
“As a rule, they simply stare at me. Then I reach into my wallet and take out something. It all depends upon what I think of the man and the strategic importance of his house. Sometimes I give him fifty dollars. Sometimes I give him twenty — and sometimes I give him a hundred. I have the mountains and the desert dotted with such houses, son.”
I could not help breaking in to ask him if he really wished to tell me so much about his private affairs. But he only smiled at me. He said that he hoped that this would be only the beginning of long business relations between us; and, in short, he told me that he was sure that I would make a successful life out of my career beyond the law.
I give you his reasons exactly as he gave them to me. He told me that most criminals are of course unsuccessful, but that is because they are stupid and uneducated, as a rule, and because they often have vital moral weaknesses — they cannot resist liquor, drugs, and a thousand other vices.
Above all, they have not the sense to associate themselves with other men who are trustworthy in their crimes, and the result is that the police are able to do most of their detective work by simply talking to the associates of suspected criminals. He went on from this to tell me that because I had been forced into a career of crime rather than made a deliberate choice of it, I had a thousand times greater chance of winning out.
“When I offer this opening to you, I have gone into detail so that you will have nothing to reproach me with hereafter. If you don’t like my proposition, or my share of the loot, or any other feature which you see in it, you may back out now. There will be no hard feelings on my part. Every man who works for me hears just what you are hearing, and those men rarely break with me, because they know that they have to depend on me in the first place for the locating of good ‘plants,’ and in the second place for the measures which make crime safe.”
I tried to tell him that it was not the safety or danger of crime to which I objected so much as crime itself; but he silenced me completely enough by telling me that I could take or leave his proposal exactly as I chose. He would not force me. After all, what was there for me to do? I felt that there was only one avenue open to me unless I wished to surrender myself to the police.
So, in another five minutes, I was sitting in the dusk of the day listening to Tex Cummins as he outlined what my next steps were to be. He had selected the thing for me to do and the man with whom I was to do it. Before the dark was firmly settled over the mountains I was in the saddle. Into the empty saddle holster he thrust his own rifle. He gave me fifty dollars”in case anything went wrong”and he shook hands and wished me luck.
I started away for my first deliberate violation of the law.
XVI. THE SIGNAL
MY WAY HELD south, and at last was to pass down the valley near the house of O’Rourke. But the trip which had required five hours through rough going and in the teeth of a storm — five hours of agony — needed only two, now that I understood the lay of the land and had a mountain horse beneath me.
I whistled the signal which we had agreed upon — two short blasts, a pause, and then a long trill. After that, I sat down cross-legged, with my back to a tree, and waited. For it was a warm night, with a south wind straggling up the ravine and touching me with a friendly hand. There is nothing so human as the touch of a soft wind in the dark of the night.
Presently I saw a silhouette between me and the house. It was only for an instant, crossing the outline of one of the bright windows, but I thought that it was about the size of Mike. I repeated the signal softly. In another moment, she was standing before me.
I said: “Sit down, Mike, and rest your feet; I’m tired, and I suppose you’re tired, too.”
There was a flattened stump top just beside me, just a few inches above the top of the ground. Mike sat down on that.
“I’m not tired out shooting up posses, though,” said she.
“You’ve heard about that?” I asked, with rather a thrill of gratification.
But she only snorted, and remained silent for a time.
“That’s the way you’re going straight?” said she.
I tried to explain: “I rode till I was half dead with the cold that night, and I blundered into the first house where I saw a light”
“Oh, I know,” said she impatiently. “The whole range knows all about it. Jackson did the talking. I suppose that Lawton wouldn’t have said a word. Some of the thick heads want to fire Lawton, now, because he didn’t capture a criminal — a murderer — when he had the man in his house!”
She was so savage about it, that I was really afraid of her.
“He’s a fine fellow,” I admitted. “I hope that he doesn’t come to any trouble, because he treated me like a white man.”
She grunted again. I began to grow angry in turn.
“I’ve come to pay back your twenty dollars,” said I. I held out a bill toward her. She merely lighted a match and examined it. Then she blew the match
out.
“I don’t take stolen money,” said she.
It was enough to make any one excited. I, being just eighteen years old, was boiling in an instant. I sat bolt upright and glared at her.
“Who said that I stole it?” I cried to her.
“Well, did you work for it?”
“It was given to me,” said I.
“I hadn’t thought of that,” said Mike. “I hadn’t thought that you might beg for what you needed!”
“Confound it!” I shouted at her. “I didn’t beg for it! It was given to me!”
“For nothing?” said she.
“An advance payment on — some — some work that I’m going to do.”
I could not help a slight faltering of my voice as I said this, and she leaped at my weakness instantly.
“What sort of work?” snapped Mike.
“Well, work is work. And it’s none of your business,” said I.
“Crooked money is just as bad before you’ve worked for it as after you’ve worked for it,” said Mike.
I had one hearty wish, and I told her so. “I wish you were a man,” said I through my teeth.
“No you don’t,” said Mike with the most infernal assurance. “If I were a man, you’d be afraid of me.”
This impertinence made me see red. I could only gasp, and she immediately followed up her remark by asserting: “You’re afraid of me even when I’m only a girl!”
“Well,” said I recovering a little, “I have brought back your twenty dollars to you, Miss O’Rourke. Now I’ll be getting on.”
I held out the money, but she paid no attention to it. I folded it up and threw it into her lap. She brushed it away, and the breeze turned it slowly over and over on the ground like a dead leaf.
“Take it or leave it,” said I. “I’ve returned the money to you. It was good enough for me, and it’s good enough for you. Good night!”
I stepped to the mare, and I drew up the cinches with a wicked force that made the poor animal stagger and grunt. Then I jumped back at Mike and stood ominously over her.